Unbeatable fresh sweet corn! A mountain of it wouldn't be enough! The here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of its perfect flavor has us dashing to the farmstand on a daily basis, heaving bags and baskets fresh-picked sweet corn to the kitchen for our lunches and yours. Here's to corn!

Oh glorious string beans! Steamed just to the tender crunch of perfection, abundant in the field and in the kitchen, packed neatly in Mason jars with garlic and dill flowers, brined and preserved for the months to come. Here's to beans!

And basil - fragrant, enticing basil! Its spicy scent lingers on fingertips long after picking. Flavor and aroma of high summer, pungent and delicate all at once. Here's to basil!

And here's to the garden workhorses, the plants that tend to be overlooked and forgotten for more exciting harvests, the ones we tire of harvesting and contemplate pulling up: here's to the chamomile, and the nasturtiums, and the signet marigolds with their citrus scent.

We celebrate each of these plants in our meal this week. Peppery nasturtium flowers and leaves grace our pressed cabbage salad, sweet corn adorns our red kidney beans, and basil weaves in and out of the menu. Chamomile infuses a coconut milk panna cotta the likes of which have never been seen before. Marigolds sprinkle our salad greens.

Join us in raising your glass -- here's to summer's bounty!

With gratitude, and as always, rice and beanly yours,

The Macro Mamas

|| Menu for Saturday, August 12, 2017 ||

All items on our lunch menu today are free from gluten-containing ingredients

With the first days of August already behind us, we find ourselves wondering where the summer is ducking off to. This time of year is usually plentiful with ripeness, vibrance, and strength. The hot sun imparts a hard, masculine energy to these days -- that is, if we aren't experiencing a monsoon, as happens so frequently now. With heat and bright sun, we turn to lighter fare still. Less oil, less heat. Simple blanching replaces sautéeing and stewing, and we treat the season's first tender green beans with the lightest touch when it comes to cooking. This week we serve them with the cool, refreshing flavor of tarragon, and the bright, playful jewels of oven-roasted cherry tomatoes.

Here's another thought, for what it's worth, on the balance and harmony in the turn of the seasons. High summer is, for farmers and market folk like ourselves, a time when we are busy and tired, and we often neglect the relationships that keep us in community together in favor of other pursuits (like sleep, right?). But some time between mid-July and early August, hundreds of thousands of bulbs of garlic across the region simultaneously reach maturity and must be pulled. Suddenly every farmer and grower is in communication -- How is the yield? Have you pulled yours yet? Was there any rot of this or that variety? Do you know this neat trick to determine if they're ready? -- and for a moment, this work that often divides us instead brings us all together with the common interest of getting our garlic in, dry, and preserved for the season. Garlic itself reflects this binding property: each clove, individually wrapped, sits alongside other individual cloves, wrapped together by a papery tissue that unites them all, attached to the same root base.

Peas plumping up their pods, blossoms swelling into fruit, the slight withering of garlic stalks that lets you know their harvest time is coming--in midsummer, we get to reap what we've sown. In the kitchen this means we're harvesting edible flowers from our modest kitchen garden and tart cherries from our tree, and rejoicing in the first tender summer squash and snap peas from our farmers.

Each bite of bounty is work and energy embodied in edible form, and a reflection of the care that was taken in its production. A friend of mine told me that she planted thousands of flowers this spring, envisioning her harvest of fragrance and color in armfuls and bouquets, come July. But she neglected the seedlings in the spring, and didn't give them fertile soil or attention. Now, she laughed hopelessly, she's left with scraggly plants and no flowers to speak of. Not to make an example of her, but...well, we reap what we sow. It's not enough to just plant seeds of ideas, or hopes, or kohlrabi; you have to nurture them, and defend them from pests, and tend to their well-being. We reap what we sow--and water, and weed, and trellis, and prune, and...

Big thanks as always to our farmers and producers, who do the essential work of tending their fields and forests, so that we can in turn tend to our stew pots and trays in the oven, and so that you can, in turn, tend to your lunch.